History Is Not the Past

Why Blog My Weeksville Research?

The Weeksville Heritage Center is a collection of four, wood-frame houses (also known as the Hunterfly Road Houses) tucked sideways inside a city block in Central Brooklyn, New York. The houses have been preserved to tell the story of Weeksville, a black community of landowners formed in the 1830s in what was then rural Kings County, Long Island.

Black families established Weeksville in the 1830s, after New York State instituted a $250 property requirement for black voters. Weeksville appears on the 1849 map above, just off the Long Island Railroad, roughly halfway between Prospect Park (not shown) and East New York. In this 1855 advertisement in Frederick Douglass’s Anti-slavery newspaper, The North Star, school-teacher Junius C. Morel offers cheap land for sale.

Why Blog My Research

There are so many stories I want to tell.

It takes so long to research and write a story. Meanwhile, every day I’m learning something new.

Maybe it’ll help to do a little blog post every day (or every so-often). I can play with the maps, see how they work, what they can do for a story. I can publish images and archival finds. I can experiment with story ideas. Also: people can find me. We can collaborate.

Eventually

I want to do podcasts and pop-up exhibits and family histories… Ultimately I want the Weeksville Heritage Center to get enough funding to hire full-time historians and archivists and exhibit developers. Weeksville is an important part of Brooklyn’s history. The Heritage Center is uniquely positioned to influence the narrative of Central Brooklyn.